[From the journal of Dr. John H. Watson]
Of all the strange characters that fate has seen fit to assemble in this perplexing business, I find that the android, Connor, presents the most singular case for study. As a medical man, I have spent my life dedicated to the remarkable, fragile machinery of the human body. To be confronted, then, with a machine that so perfectly emulates a man is a challenge to every principle of anatomy I have ever held.
I found him one evening standing by the window of our hotel suite, observing the ceaseless river of light from the traffic below. His posture was unnaturally still, his expression placid. The small, illuminated circle on his temple glowed a placid blue. Seizing the opportunity, I ventured to sate my professional curiosity.
"Connor," I began, "forgive my forwardness, but your very existence is a medical marvel. Your body... how is it constructed? Do you possess a circulatory system, for instance?"
He turned to me, his gaze direct and without artifice. "I have a circulatory system, Doctor," he replied, his voice even and calm. "It regulates the temperature of my internal biocomponents and distributes a fluid you would know as Thirium 310. It is the android equivalent of blood."
"Fascinating!" I exclaimed, my mind reeling. "And your nervous system? Your thoughts, your analytical processes—are they the product of some synthetic brain?"
"My cognitive functions are run by a series of quantum processors located here," he said, tapping his temple. "They allow me to analyse vast amounts of data, reconstruct crime scenes from available evidence, and predict probabilities with an accuracy of 98.7%."
I confess, a part of me felt a chill at the cold certainty of his words. Here was a being who could replicate the deductive feats of Holmes, not through genius and intuition, but through sheer calculation. It was both magnificent and terrifying. Before I could inquire further, we were interrupted.
"A mind of pure logic, it is impressive, non?" Hercule Poirot had entered the room, impeccably dressed as ever. "But it is a mind without an understanding of the human heart, and it is there, my friends, that our killer resides." He beamed at us, his little grey cells(as he'd call it..whatever it is)clearly working at a furious pace. "And that has given me an idea. A plan to discover if our Kira, or our B.B., has eyes and ears within the police themselves."
We all gathered—Holmes, myself, Miss Marple, Hastings, L, and Connor—as Poirot laid out his proposal. It was, I must admit, a work of considerable ingenuity.
"The Japanese police force is a large and complex machine," he began. "To find a single bad cog is impossible. So, we do not look. We make the cog announce itself. I propose we create a fiction. We will invent a criminal, a man guilty of the most heinous crimes, and create for him a full and detailed file. We will then inform the entire National Police Agency that this man is to be transferred from one prison to another at a specific time. The information will be widespread. If this imaginary man then becomes a victim of Kira's heart attack—a thing that can only be reported by us, as he does not exist—we will know the leak is within the NPA. We will have flushed out our rat!"
He concluded with a flourish, clearly very proud of his scheme. Holmes gave a noncommittal sniff, and I myself felt a nagging sense of doubt. The plan was clever, certainly, but it struck me as being somewhat... flawed. It was a grand gesture, a theatrical performance aimed at a vast audience. It felt like casting a net into the entire ocean in the hopes of catching a single, specific fish. It was too broad, too loud.
It was then that Miss Marple, who had been quietly knitting in her armchair, looked up over her spectacles.
"It is a very clever plan, Mr. Poirot," she said, her voice soft as lambswool. "It reminds me of when the vicar in St. Mary Mead wanted to find out who was stealing biscuits from the collection plate tin. He put a notice on the church board for everyone to see, saying he'd be watching the tin all day Sunday."
Poirot looked slightly bemused. "And did he catch the thief, Madame?"
"Oh, no, dear," she said with a gentle smile. "Of course not. The thief simply waited until Monday. When you tell everyone you are watching, the guilty party knows simply not to move. But if the vicar had quietly mentioned to just three or four of his most trusted parishioners that he was leaving a special tin of ginger snaps out... well, it is a known fact that old Mrs. Higgins cannot resist a ginger snap. It is the intimate secret, you see, that is the most tempting to betray."
A profound silence fell over the room. Poirot's jaw was slightly agape. In her simple, village way, Miss Marple had laid bare the flaw in his grand design. She had perfected it.
"We do not need to test the whole NPA," L said, speaking for the first time. He had, of course, understood instantly. "We only need to test Chief Yagami's core team. The ones in this hotel with us."
And so, the plan was refined. There would be no fictitious criminal. The target would be real: a low-level fraudster already serving a life sentence, a man whose death would change nothing, thus easing the moral burden of using a life as bait. Chief Yagami was brought in and, though he paled at the proposal, he understood its grim necessity. Although it'd be lying to say we also didn't feel contempt(that's the perfect word for this feeling of guilt perhaps) for using a human as bait. Chief Yagami would brief his six most trusted officers, and only them. The information would be that this prisoner, for security reasons, would make a one-time, non-public, televised appearance from within the prison walls, broadcast only to a secure internal network. The broadcast window would be precisely fifteen minutes long, between three and three-fifteen in the afternoon. If the man died during that window, our leak was one of Yagami's trusted six.
The next day, the air in our command suite was thick with tension. Yagami had briefed his men. We were all gathered around a monitor, displaying a live feed of a drab, empty room. At precisely 3:00 PM, the fraudster, a nervous-looking man in a prison uniform, was led into the room and left alone.
The clock on the screen began to tick. One minute passed. Then two. Holmes stared at the screen with an unnerving intensity. Poirot adjusted his tie, his usual composure showing the faintest of cracks. I found myself holding my breath. It felt a great deal like waiting for a patient to emerge from a most dangerous surgery.
The prisoner shuffled his feet. He looked around the empty room, clearly confused. The clock ticked past the seven-minute mark. Then, at 3:08 PM, it happened.
The man's eyes went wide. He gasped, a look of profound shock on his face. He clutched his chest, staggered back a single step, and collapsed to the floor in a heap. A medic team rushed in, but I knew from the man's vacant stare and the sudden, awful stillness of his form that it was pointless.
He was dead.
Kira had taken the bait. The whisper was coming from inside these very walls.